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high subjectivist, engulfs all space in a sweeping vision, both Cartesian
angel and Cartesian machine, both metaphysical plenitude and the phys–
ical void. He fears, of course, the space he celebrates. His war poems
will have a dynamic meaning when there is no war. They are not depen–
dent on the local event, since the disrelation may be universal, and the
airman's unschooled eye be also the eye of the profoundest scholar.
Charles E. Butler's
Cut Is the Branch,
to which Archibald Mac–
Leish writes a preface, is more nearly what might be called a "human"
document. The soldier is haunted by a blue bowl, a lady's glove, and
other items.
Allan Dowling's
A Poet's Youth
shows, if nothing else, the flagrant
mistake of viewing life as a whole, which can be dismissed under the
guise of a truism and a cup of flame. The word, he tells us, is the ex–
ceeding flower that always justifies. Justifies what? Dowling expects
agreement as to the immutability of the ideas he proposes-the word
God, for example, and no further exploration necessary. Beauty, too, is
truth.
Now comes Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk of Our Lady of
Gethsemani, Kentucky, a state noted for its dancing Methodists and
hard-shelled Baptists, all very beautiful. Thomas Merton writes as if
he were two men, a Catholic monk and a man of this world. The latter
is, it would seem, the stronger poet. His poetry somehow escapes the
limits he has set on thought. For that reason alone, it makes a fascinating
study, one worthy of our devotion. God, who should be the immutable
whole, is also a mystery, we find, and so in no position to cast illumina–
tion on the mystery of things. God is only a support and substitute for
the low probability of each single case. Merton, in fact, is at his best
when he sees God as having entered so much into the relative as to be
almost if not totally indistinct from it. Merton is at his best when the
train rails scream like demented ladies, there being no God to speak
of-when, to employ an image not his own, it would seem that the iron
bridge cannot support the weight of a single rose. In fact, things do act,
religiously or unreligiously, in an unprincipled way, as when all the
pieces of the mosaic earth get up and fly away like birds. The flight of
the alone to the alone! Disorder becomes the only order. Merton's poetry,
rich on many levels, drawing from many unlikely sources, both the
Catholic Church and voodooism, is chiefly significant for its sense of
the individual, the lonely, the fact that the total aspect of nature at any
given moment is unique and will never occur again. Perhaps the ex–
treme of mysticism is in this case the extreme of skepticism. Otherwise,
with a greeting-card monotony, the trees bow down like girls wearing
white dresses for the morning's first communion. And there are other
dangerous impersonations, not always effective, which doubtless all of us
are inclined to be guilty of, in one way or another.
Two old New England farmers, a little frost-bitten, are once more
